Witness, for instance, seventh period: AP Physics. In the row before me, Amber and Nataley quietly discuss whose basically identical calf-length white socks are cuter. (“No, yours are,” Amber whispers, when Dr. Halfrecht turns around to draw a diagram of how one can measure the speed of light. “No,” Nataley mouths silently in response. “Yours are adorable.”) Beside me, Amelia Lionel, the heir to the Wonder Bread fortune (really!), pretends to sip from a can of Coke. In fact, she is spitting tobacco juice into it. Dipping is cool here, for some reason, particularly if you are on the field hockey team, which Amelia is. The weirdest things get cool sometimes. This is why I have never taken a lot of stock in ‘being’ cool (as if popularity is something that inhabits you, permanently, a virus that overwhelms your immune system so completely that you cease to ‘be’ you; instead you have become cool). Sometimes I like things cool kids like. But I find it a little ridiculous to like ALL of the things that the cool kids like. I mean, dip? Really? All the tooth-staining power of coffee with the extra added bonus of mouth cancer? Thank you, but no.
The bell rings. We stand and wait as poor Dr. Halfrecht, who just wants to share the magic of physics with young people, shuffles out of the room, shoulders slightly hunched. He perks up a little when he sees Kayley, who actually likes physics, smiling at him, and then shuffles out the door.
So, yes. We are awash in a sea of traditions, and I hate them all. I like going to Hoover, because the only thing worse than having just a baof is being separated from her. I mean, Kayley is the badass I can never be, and if you can’t be a badass, it is at least a privilege to hang out with one. Hoover is all right. But the incessant fetishizing of traditions? Unbearable.
And so when, just after Kayley spitrubs the stone, someone runs past Kayley and me and whispers “Freak the Geek,” I am doubly pissed. First, I am pissed because Freak the Geek is a tradition. And second, I’m pissed because you only hear those words whispered to you when you are one of the geeks who are about to get freaked. I’m not ashamed that I love Dr. Who, or that I’ve read ten thousand pages of HP fanfiction online. I’m not even ashamed about my Pokémon addiction. (Okay, a little.) I like being a geek. But no one—not even the hard-core geeks who have g-e-e-k tattooed on their knuckles—wants to be one of THE geeks.
Kayley and I wheel around simultaneously, trying to identify the whisperer. But she’s already several paces away, just a narrow-hipped body with a blond ponytail bobbing around. She could be any of us, really. And that’s the idea, I guess: Freak the Geek is the one day each year when everybody at Hoover gets to be One of Us—except, I suppose, for Kayley and me. I feel weirdly embarrassed, like I’ve disappointed the universe by failing to claw far enough out of the social-caste basement to escape whatever humiliation awaits.
We know the drill, because we’ve seen geeks Freaked our freshman and sophomore years. The entire class gets together—at least everyone who is willing to participate in idiotic traditions, which is almost everyone—and on a chosen day in the second semester of junior year, they pick two geeks to Freak. Freaking takes various forms, of course: They might drag you by the ankles to the pond and throw you in, or they might egg your car with three hundred eggs. The Freaking always lacks cleverness, because—as previously noted—those doing the planning don’t spend enough of their time engaged in academic pursuits. I mean, think of the Freaking opportunities physics provides!
Kayley and I don’t say anything; we just take off sprinting toward my car. I figure it’s our best chance. But when we get within view of the parking lot, I see fifty girls standing in concentric rings around my SUV. Each of them appears to be holding a gun. “Jesus, Lauren,” she mumbles under her breath to me, “have they renamed it Kill the Geek?” One of them—honestly, they all look the same from this distance, but I think it might be this field hockey girl named Josie—raises her weapon toward us. It’s a strange-looking gun, with a pink handle and an exceptionally long barrel. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t shoot bullets, but even so I dive for the ground and cover my head. Kayley just stands there, and when I look up at her, she’s shaking her head. “Paintballs?!” she shouts. “Paintballs?! The whole world of mischief and malfeasance is available to you and you pick PAINTBALLS?! You disappoint me, ladies.” I cover my head up and want to disappear, but I manage in a shaky voice to say, “You’re an f’ing folk hero, K?—”
The sound that interrupts me is not like a gunshot; it’s just a loud puff of air. I’m watching from the ground: Kayley doesn’t even flinch when a splatter of scarlet red paint bursts a foot away from her head against one of our campus’s famed live oaks. I’m inclined to stay down, but Kayley reaches down and pulls on the collar of my school-provided itchy white blouse, and I rise. We take off running together, away from the parking lot toward the lacrosse practice field. I don’t hear any more paintball firings as I race across Hoover Green. I want to run back toward the classrooms, because surely someone will help. I mean, the administration has no official policy on Freak the Geek because they love traditions too much to denounce any of them, but they wouldn’t let this happen to us. But Kayley grabs me, steering me toward the woods. “We just need a teacher,” I say. I can hear them behind me, some girl shouting, “Switch to automatic mode, Scarlet Ballers!” Kayley swivels around and starts running backward long enough to shout, “You call yourselves the Scarlet Ballers and we’re the geeks?”
I hear a series of air bursts, and I turn back long enough to see how far away they are and the bright red explosions littering the ground behind of us. Kayley shouts, “Lauren, come on. Fast.” We’re almost across the lacrosse field now, a thick stand of trees before us, and the Freakers must have terrible aim or else paintball guns are hard to shoot, because the trees are soon riddled with abstract paintings in red, but nothing’s hit me yet. Kayley’s running just in front of me, crouching slightly, and I say, “Stay low, stay low,” and she says, “I know,” and then finally we’re in among the trees.
And here is our advantage: The Freakers might be in better physical shape than us, but no one knows these woods like Kayley and me. We’ve been walking around the hundreds of acres of forest on Hoover’s campus for three years’ worth of lunch periods. Both the food and the atmosphere at the cafeteria are unbearable, and anyway, we’ve never really gotten along terribly well with the girls who eat there—which is to say all of them. So as Kayley and I weave parallel paths through the trees and brush, a thick blanket of rotting leaves cushioning our every step, I can hear the voices of the Freakers grow more distant. I’m still half-running, which makes me fully out of breath. Still, my wits have recovered sufficiently to talk in complete sentences.
“I never really thought about it before,” I tell Kayley as we simultaneously duck under a low-hanging oak branch, “but just the phrase ‘Freak the Geek’ is just hugely lame.”
“Yeah,” Kayley says. “True. It’s almost like the name was thought up by a bunch of mustachioed purple-hued maltworms.” Kayley likes using Shakespearean insults.
I get down on one knee in a flash to pull up my socks—a girl has to protect herself from poison ivy. “Richard III?” I guess.
“Henry IV,” she says.
I nod. I can hardly hear the girls behind us anymore; I mostly just hear our breath coming fast and hard and the ground scrunching beneath us. “Like, admittedly I am not an expert in slang,” I say, “but isn’t freaking usually kind of sexual?”
Kayley turns around to me and runs backward just long enough to say, “Example?”
“‘Madam, I wish to freak your body.’ Or, ‘My heart desires to become freaky with you.’”
“Ha,” says Kayley. She doesn’t laugh much, but she ha’s a fair amount. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s what they want. Maybe that’s why they picked the cutest girls in the junior class. Maybe they just want to slather us in paintball paint and then do unspeakable things to us.” I laugh, but only for a syllable. I think Kayley is beautiful—oval face and big eyes and very curvy—and I think that I am marginally acceptable. I mean, there are no large-scale problems with me that I can detect, except for a general lack of vroom in the bust area and a nose that occupies a bit too much space. But no one would think of me as pretty at Hoover. Or even Kayley. Being pretty here involves so much more than just being pretty, and frankly I don’t have time for it.
By the time we crest the hill, I can’t even hear the Freakers anymore, and even though my Mary Janes are half-soaked, I feel good. I wish they hadn’t picked us. There are plenty of unpopular people to go around—the drama kids who do the tech work, the girl who single-handedly runs the student newspaper, the girls who Kayley and I play Pokémon with in the student lounge during free periods—but if they had to pick us, at least they’ve picked BOTH of us.
We descend the other side of the hill, headed toward the cemetery where the school founder and her family are buried. My weight is way back on my ankles as I half-walk and half-slide down the hill, dodging boulders and trees and the immense mounds of kudzu that have overtaken bushes twice as tall as me. We get down the hill much quicker than we got up it, and I know we’re near the bottom when I hear Hoover Creek.
“The bridge,” I say.
“Yeah, obviously,” Kayley answers without looking back at me.
“Jesus, sorry,” I say. The land flattens out and Kayley launches into full stride, and she gets way out in front of me, as if she feels compelled to remind me that she’s faster than I am. But it doesn’t matter—we’re going to the same place. I watch her reach the dirt road that leads back to the stables, run parallel to it for a moment, and then dip her head down underneath the one-lane bridge that crosses over the creek.
Kayley and I had spent many lunches under the bridge—the cement outcropping lets us sit with our legs dangling over the water, which ran loud enough to muffle our voices to anyone walking or driving above, but quiet enough that we could always hear each other.